ASRock X79 Extreme3 Motherboard

With the X79 and Sandy Bridge-E scene dominated by manufacturers pushing their products as overclocking friendly or cramming the latest gear onto their boards, some consumers and end-users still prefer a basic and no-nonsense platform for their computers. Enter the budget slice of the X79 pie, product offerings based off the vanilla chipset features but still offer top performance for the buck. Today we take a look at such a product from ASRock: the X79 Extreme3 motherboard designed for the Sandy Bridge-E LGA2011 platform. Carrying a local SRP of Php10,700, this one of the most affordable LGA2011 board you can find. Let’s check out what this board can do, and let’s make this showy!

ASRock has made their presence felt in the motherboard scene with their constantly improving product line and highly affordable offerings. ASRock, a former subsidiary of ASUS and now wholly owned by Pegatron, started out in the budget segment competing with Biostar, Foxconn and ECS in this segment. In more recent times, they have cemented themselves in the top-tier ranks of motherboard vendors and are still churning out products for different budget segments. ASRock has a line of high-end motherboard under the Fatal1ty series, intended for gamers and overclockers in mind and their mainstream series, the Extreme series. The motherboard we have for today is the entry-level X79 Extreme3. ASRock has “packed this board to the gills” so let’s check it out. Here are some feature, specs and photos of the board:

• Premium Gold Caps (2.5 x longer life time), 100% Japan-made high-quality Conductive Polymer Capacitors
• Intel^® Core™ i7 processor family for the LGA 2011 Socket
• Supports Quad Channel DDR3 2400+(OC)
• Digi Power, Advanced 5 + 1 Power Phase Design
• 3 x PCIe 3.0 x16 Slots, Supports AMD 3-Way CrossFireX™ and NVIDIA^® 3-Way SLI™
• Clear CMOS Switch with LED
• Supports ASRock X-FAN, XFast RAM, XFast LAN, XFast USB, XFast Charger, Graphical UEFI, UEFI System Browser, AXTU
• 7.1 CH HD Audio with Content Protection (Realtek ALC898 Audio Codec), Supports THX TruStudio™
• Free Bundle : CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5 Trial, ASRock MAGIX Multimedia Suite

[toggle title="Specifications"]

[/toggle]

[tabs tab1="Packaging" tab2="Closer Look"]

[/tabs]

TEST SETUP and OVERCLOCKING

Our test processor is Intel’s top model in the Sandy Bridge E line-up, the i7-3960X. This processor features an unlocked multiplier amongst its other features and is what makes this a very flexible processor. The ASRock X79 Extreme3 features overclocking presets and unlike the ECS model with a similar feature, we found ASRock’s implementation to be far more superior. ASRock provides preset values for overclocking as well as fully manual option. The presets though range up to dangers levels above 5Ghz so we warn you to be very careful before setting these values.

All in all overclocking with the ASRock board was easy and we managed to get our chip to 4.5Ghz which is looking like the wall in our SB-E sample OC potential.

PERFORMANCE

[tabs tab1="SiSoft SANDRA" tab2="wPrime" tab3="Cinebench" tab4="SuperPi" tab5="Video Conversion"]

[/tabs]

CONCLUSION

We’re really impressed with the ASRock X79 Extreme3. It’s a product that reiterates the fact that you can still go the high-end, high-performance route without spending too much on everything. Its performance is within any other X79 products and overclocking can really set this thing off in the right path for anyone with an SB-E.

Coming in at just Php10,700, this motherboard from ASRock is the cheapest X79 board out right now in the local market. You get pretty much anything you’ll get from any high-end board sans high-profile heatsinks or extra connectivity and features but all in all everything you need to get a working machine for your Sandy Bridge-E chip is here.

Enthusiasts are sometimes too caught up in the illusion of owning high-end demands everything to be high-end but in reality this is not true. A carefully selected list of components, even at a budget, can be called a beast also. As a workstation platform, the X79 Extreme3 is everything you need to get you up and running and gamers intending to go down this path are also covered. As we’ve said already, we really like the X79 Extreme3. ASRock has certainly proven to us they are to go-to guys for cost-effective solutions.